There Is No Common Ground Anymore
The health care debate in Congress for months focused on the “gang of six,” a group of three Democrats and three Republicans in the Senate Finance Committee who spent endless hours barricaded on the...
View ArticleWhere Have All the Moderates Gone?
As polls close on the East Coast almost exactly a year after Barack Obama was elected president, the nation is looking in particular to a congressional race in an otherwise-quiet electoral year for a...
View ArticlePolitical Lens-scape Increasingly Polarized
On the eve of Obama’s State of the Union address last week, Gallup released a job-approval poll remarkable not for the president’s decline in popularity in his first year (a headline of many recent...
View ArticleDo Gerrymanders Come in Shades of Red and Blue?
The type of redistricting reform Miller-McCune examines in its March-April issue is founded on a pair of premises — that citizens would be better off wresting control of the highly political process...
View ArticleThe Comforting Notion of an All-Powerful Enemy
We have seen the enemy, and he is powerful. That’s a recurring motif of contemporary political discourse, as generalized fear mutates for many into a fixation on a ferocious foe. Partisan rhetoric has...
View ArticleDismissing Gridlock: A Case for Parliamentary Systems
This story originally posted on April 20, 2009. Perhaps you’ve heard these complaints before: There’s too much gridlock in Washington; our leaders are incapable of solving big problems; politics is...
View ArticleMandatory Voting As a Cure for Extreme Partisanship?
Political scientists will inevitably get more evidence this fall for a pattern particularly true of midterm elections: People who don’t follow politics — and don’t have rabid views on the most...
View ArticleIncome Inequality Linked to Senate Standoffs
In the United States, the past quarter-century has been marked by two disturbing societal trends: increasing levels of both income inequality and political polarization. The rich are growing richer,...
View ArticleTo Reach Consensus, Let’s Talk Less
When it comes to controversial political issues, we often seek out sources of information that confirm what we already believe — conservatives, in other words, watch Fox News, and liberals lean forward...
View ArticlePolitical Polarization Grows as Job Security Falls
The debt ceiling drama under way right now in Washington — or, more specifically, the dramatic inability of Republicans and Democrats to reach compromise and the cheerleading of many who don’t want...
View ArticleNixon’s Presidential Library: The Last Battle of Watergate
Should the National Archives be in the business of presenting objective public history at the nation’s presidential libraries? Or should the private organizations that fund many of these institutions...
View ArticleHouse Puts Transportation in Partisan Crossfire
The U.S. House transportation bill released last week by Rep. John Mica contained a number of provisions that immediately alarmed transit and smart growth advocates and their Democratic supporters on...
View ArticleThink Tanks Are Nonpartisan? Think Again
One of the strangest institutions in Washington — and perhaps the hardest to comprehend from the outside — is the think tank, that quasi-academic, sort-of-political organization that offers, as its...
View ArticleCould Climate Change be the Epitome of Partisanship?
It’s the issue that dare not speak its name – climate change. As the New York Times, NPR, the Associated Press and a host of pundits, including our Tom Jacobs, have noticed, talk of global warming has...
View ArticleEven Ronald Reagan Negotiated
Much commentary on the recent deadlock in Washington has mentioned the previous, Clinton-era shutdown drama in 1995, only noting briefly a dozen or so other shutdowns going back to the 1970s. Below, an...
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